I've been on a real writing tear recently. I'm working on something I haven't put a hand to in awhile: genre fiction. Mostly, I write scripts and screenplays lately, but short stories is where I got started.

Right now, I'm eight thousand words into a hard-boiled detective story set in New Orleans; real Hard Drinks and Hard-Eyed Women type stuff, and it's been gloriously fun to write. I've built a little daily routine: breakfast and strong, black coffee at seven. Read Dashiell Hammett for an hour or so (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse were both good. I started reading The Maltese Falcon two days ago, and I can already see why it's everybody's favorite). Then I sit down at my laptop, at a little white table in front of a window facing the butcher shop and the worn old church across the street, all the windows open, blowing in the sounds of the street and the smells of smoking meat, heat, and the river nearby. I play Crime Noir playlists on 8tracks.com, mostly moody jazz. I chew my empty pipe, drink coffee, and look sometimes at the blooming Peace Lily that seems to so love the sunshine by the window.

And I write. It's been great fun.

Until a few days ago, when I reached the Gardener Stage of the story.

I don't know about other of my artsy friends, but I have strong suspicions that The Gardener Stage is universal. I know that it's happened to me on every single song, poem, and story I've ever sat down to write, and it plays hell with a writing streak (and my emotions).

Briefly, The Gardener Stage is the moment when I decide that the project I'm working on is stalled, or bogged down. I just need some time to think about it and let it ferment. In the meantime, I reason, I'll just step away from it and start something else. A script, maybe. Or a different story. It's like the mini midlife crisis at the halfway point of every story.

It's the moment when the Gardener, tired and sore from digging weeds (but making progress: good progress, even if some of the adverbs are going to need pruning later on), sits back on his haunches to rest, and sees beautiful, untilled ground a little ways away. He looks at the land, imagining all the beautiful things he might plant there. He looks at the weeds around the things he's already planted. Those goddamned fucking weeds he's been digging for weeks, back aching and hands sore. And he has been meaning to plant those blueberry bushes...

(What I'm doing right now, writing this blog, is planting blueberry bushes.)

It's hot. July by the ocean is oppressive and humid. I've been reading Detective fiction for a month. I've been writing this story for a month. I don't want to write one more hard-boiled word. I want to read strange, psychedelic comic books from the 80s and dive back into a comic book series I plotted out right before the move. Or maybe finish revising a screenplay I wrote half a decade ago. Or maybe a romance! Or maybe...!

Someone told me once that writers write and writers read, but, most importantly, writers finish things. If you just go around starting things and writing them until they stop being fresh and new and exciting and fun, what do you have?

You have drawers full of ideas and paper. You have files on a hard drive. (I have plenty of both.)

But if you stretch your back, wipe your brow, and turn your eyes back down to the weeds, to the next bit, the next word, the next sentence, the next page, before you know it, you have a THING that didn't exist before you finished it. So, back I go to breakfast and Hammett and moody jazz. Back to my white table by the window. I keep telling myself: one word after another. The next scene. The next page, and the next, until The End.

And after that? Well. There's always the blueberries, the Peace Lilies, and the weeds.

-- On the hottest July day so far,
from the only lighted window on my street